David Cameron's sins of omission

WHEN DAVID Cameron became Conservative leader in 2005, his party seemed alienated from modern British culture and bitter about it. At the annual Conservative conference , Mr Cameron stood before a party on the threshold of power. He had cause to be proud.

Four years is a long time to be opposition leader. After such a long run-up, the country surely has enough data to judge the credentials of its probable next prime minister.

But it has often been hard to disentangle Mr Cameron's personal creed from his strategic objectives in "detoxifying" the Tory brand. The first years of his leadership were a public relations exercise in persuading voters that Conservatives were not marginal obsessives. That meant engineering political surprises – putting the leader in situations that, by shock factor alone, would force people to pay attention to the Tories again.

Most memorably, Mr Cameron went to the Arctic to highlight the threat of climate change. But there were many such departures from the classic Tory itinerary: visits to decaying council estates to talk about social inclusion, a trip to Rwanda to promote international development.

These presentational changes would not have achieved much without a shift in Conservative rhetoric. Mr Cameron fought to abolish crude racial and sexual prejudice in his party's rank and file. He spoke of the need for compassion in penal policy; he posited "general well-being" as the key indicator of progress. That all hinted at a new Conservative ideology, dubbed variously "compassionate", "modern" and "progressive".

If the social strand to this intellectual venture was accommodation with liberalism, the economic strand was reconciliation with the public sector. "I want to challenge the idea that the public sector is somehow synonymous with an underachieving, couldn't-care-less attitude," he said in June 2006. He went on to denounce the lazy caricature of state employees as profligate bureaucrats.

The new Conservatism, it seemed, took a nuanced approach to the relationship between markets and the state.

Against that background, Mr Cameron should have been intellectually prepared for the extraordinary events of the last two years. The credit crunch had many causes, but chief among them was market failure. The aggregate power of individual greed was not adequately balanced by government regulation or social restraint.

But in his keynote address, the Tory leader offered a different explanation. The causes of Britain's economic problems, he said, are "Gordon Brown, who designed the system of financial regulation" and "government, [which] got too big, did too much and undermined responsibility". So the problem was too little political interference in a market-driven society, and also too much.

There was not a single social, economic or cultural problem in Britain that did not, according to Mr Cameron, have its roots in "Big Government". And every solution, it seems, should begin with a cull of those fabled profligate bureaucrats.

That is a big intellectual retreat from the position he held not so long ago.

No one expects a Conservative leader to reject the market and nor should they. Britain is hardly lusting after central planning and price controls. But for Mr Cameron, in a speech designed to flesh out a mature political philosophy, not to mention market forces was an extraordinary omission.

More peculiar still, Mr Cameron has witnessed a global crisis produced by inherent flaws in a system governed by laissez-faire economics and yet somehow he has emerged with an anti-government creed that sounds closer to the conservatism of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s than to his own conservatism of three years ago.

Perhaps Mr Cameron has simply missed the point of the credit crunch. Or perhaps he is calculating that brash anti-government rhetoric is a way to turn public disenchantment with politics in general into Tory votes.

Whichever it is, if his speech reflects the final destination of Mr Cameron's intellectual journey in opposition, the whole exercise, in retrospect, looks immensely naive or hugely cynical or both.